


An Optimist Makes Opportunities

by Maidenjedi



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-29 20:35:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18785728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/pseuds/Maidenjedi
Summary: Ainsley Hayes, at the end of her first week, with all her doubts and misgivings - and hardly a thing to eat in the fridge.





	An Optimist Makes Opportunities

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ashling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/gifts).



> "A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties." - Harry S Truman

Her refrigerator was empty.

Okay, there was a can of Fresca in the back.  And half a banana bread she’d stuck in there, afraid it’d go bad on the countertop even if she had never, not once in her life, let banana bread go bad.  There was a salad she’d bought the weekend before, hopes high that she would take her lunch and save some money, at least that first week when she didn’t know anyone who’d be in the mess and she’d likely want to work through lunch (she never considered she wouldn’t work through lunch – she’d skip it altogether).  There was a pitcher of sweet tea, two eggs, a jar of her mother’s strawberry jam. 

Ainsley sighed heavily and shut the door to the fridge.  She waited about twenty seconds before opening it again, staring at the scant contents in bemusement, half-expecting what was there would have multiplied.  That not being the case, she took the jam jar out and closed the door again.

She found a spoon and began to just eat the jam straight from the jar – she was out of bread, but also, she was too tired to spread jam on bread.  She was too tired to think about spreading jam on bread.

She went into her living room, meticulously clean, because she’d had the presence of mind to hire help when she told Leo McGarry “yes” after all.  And thank goodness, because she couldn’t have dealt with dust or crumbs or things not put away.  It was clean, it smelled a little like Pine, and after this week, this week especially, she was grateful for things like this.

Her answering machine was blinking, but it was after midnight on Friday, her coworkers – what a word that covered so many things! – only knew her cell phone number, and she was in no mood for what her friends would call teasing and she would be offended by.

After this week, of all weeks.  Working in that White House, of all White Houses.

Okay, yes, there was the Gilbert and Sullivan.  There was Sam’s sweet, sheepish apology (and wasn’t he _adorable_ , truly).  There was CJ, puffed up in defense of Ainsley at any perceived slight.

But there was Lionel Tribbey, who had accepted her as far as it went, but who also side-eyed her in staff meetings and gave her the bottom-fed casework to handle, sent her to the Hill to speak Republican but only, it seemed, to those who were on a warpath against her for working _in that White House_.

The jam was sweet, and quickly eaten.  She considered seriously whether she had the stamina to stand and cook eggs. 

She went back for the banana bread.

Her feet hurt.  Honestly, she’d been an associate in one of the largest firms in the country, she knew how to stand and run in heels.  She’d been browbeat by junior partners, senior partners, aspiring partners, driven crazy by ambitious interns and told where to find habeaus corpus in the dictionary by a judge who’d been there since before Brown v Board.  She knew from tired – she was a lawyer. 

And she’d been hazed.  She was the entire College Republicans chapter her junior year at Smith.  She shuddered at that thought – the Josh Lymans of the world in college were ten times as strident, ten times as cocky, and at her school, they’d been women. 

The banana bread wasn’t going to cut it.  She decided the eggs would be a good idea after all, and got out the frying pan.

Thing was, she thought as she cracked the eggs, she’d never been on the opposite side from her own party.  She was the doyenne of the Republican Party back home, the crowned princess, hailed as the party’s future and headhunted for Congress before she’d passed the bar.  She’d never been one for having things handed to her, so she’d chosen nose-to-the-grindstone volunteering the way she’d chosen the law school that hadn’t recruited her at first.  She doubled down, she worked hard, she proved she belonged, and that was Ainsley Hayes. 

But if you’d asked her, when she was spending summers stumping for candidates instead of at the beach, or that one winter when she’d gotten her car stuck in Iowa snow and walked the next mile to get to the candidate rally, if she’d be working for the most liberal Democrat to serve as president since…well, since Roosevelt?  She was contrary, was Ainsley Hayes, but she wasn’t crazy.

The eggs done, she wolfed them down, hardly tasting them.  Was she crazy?

Her friends thought so.  They said she was an affirmative action hire, a “look how bipartisan we are” hire, that McGarry was following orders and she wasn’t welcome at all, it was temporary, her career would be over after this.  _You can’t run for Congress now, you’d lose the primary before it begins.  Your grandfather is turning over in his grave._

The sweet tea hadn’t come out right, that was why there was some in the pitcher, she’d forgotten.  She drank it down anyway.

In truth, it hadn’t been a bad week, not after the Gilbert and Sullivan and the welcome, hard-won, from the senior staff.  At the office, in her cubby in the steampipe trunk distribution venue, she could almost forget how many people she hadn’t won over, she could turn up the music because no one could hear it and be bothered, and she could ignore the calls from her mother or her friends.  She could blur her vision just enough not to notice who she was writing a defense for, that it was someone she’d written a column about or someone who’d beaten a friend of hers in a race that went down to the wire, or someone who was opposed to everything she still believed in.  She wasn’t one of them – she was their lawyer. 

She didn’t need to be there in the morning, Lionel had said.  It’ll be a light weekend, he said, we’ll call if you need to be here.  She wasn’t certain if he was shutting her out or if it was for real, the army of attorneys sprinkled between the OEOB and the West Wing wouldn’t be needed on a Saturday.  She may have seen his eyes soften in sympathy when she winced in her heels (she did need to go shopping, she couldn’t do this every minute of every day), but it may have been annoyance.

She clerked for Dreifort, said someone in a whisper as she walked past, earlier that week.  Tribbey’s greatest enemy is Justice Dreifort, was the response, and there were giggles.  Or maybe there were.  Ainsley hummed He is an Englishman and went in search of a tuna sandwich in the mess, because she’d left the salad at home.

The salad she was eating now, three days later, a bit soggy and sad but drenched in ranch dressing that had come in a packet, peppered with croutons.  It would have been perfect a few days before.

The tension in her shoulders hadn’t eased.  Her head pounded, especially behind her right eye.  She was bone-weary, from the work, yes, but from holding herself up, too.

_I feel a sense of duty._

She wandered back into the living room, where her books were kept in careful alphabetical order and by genre.  She looked over the names, lazily, sleepily. 

Her biography of Harry Truman was dog-eared, creased.  She’d first read it, oh, in eighth grade, seventh?  A lot of teasing at that family Fourth of July picnic.  She reached for it now, those taunts rising in her ears, until she flipped through to the passage that had sold her on the man, if not the president. 

He’d said yes to the vice presidency knowing he’d be president.  He’d looked around at a divided and contentious Democratic Party at the very end of a tiring war, and he could have gone home to Independence.  Bess wanted him to.  Maybe Margaret wanted him to.  But the president asked him, and he said yes.

What had driven Harry Truman, if not a sense of duty?

She was no Truman.  But that had always stuck with her, that idea.  A sense of duty.

In the kitchen, the lone can of Fresca, now truly alone, beckoned her.

She thumbed the picture of Truman, taken before he’d moved to the White House. 

The White House.

Maybe it wasn’t about this White House or that White House.  Would she have loved to work for Reagan, for Coolidge?  Yes.  But she hadn’t been there.  She was here, at this time, the right place at the wrong time, and she did feel a sense of duty.

She yawned and placed Truman back on the shelf, nestled comfortably beside a less dog-eared copy of _The Life of James Madison_ , alphabetical by author.  Her headache had eased somewhat – probably the effect of eating for the first time in hours.  The tension was there, but it had begun to feel more like backbone.

Enough that she could sleep, and the Fresca could remain where it was.

_Tomorrow, I’ll go to the store.  And get jelly donuts._

She would go into the office, no matter if Lionel Tribbey needed her or not.  Because yes, Ainsley Hayes, one-time darling of the GOP, who clerked for Dreifort, who'd chaired the College Republicans at Smith and whose membership card for the Federalist Society really did reside in her wallet, felt a sense of duty.


End file.
